Display families with extensive character sets are rare for any script. With Indian typefaces, large character sets are often even less common. The Indian Type Foundry’s designs have been an exception, however. We are pleased to continue this trend with the Director multi-script series.
Director includes sub-families for five writing systems: Bengali, Devanagari, Latin, Malayalam, and Tamil. These typefaces are designed for use in large sizes. They bears some similarity with our Akhand design, but Director’s various families feature letterforms with more stroke contrast, squarer proportions, and a structure that appears more visually simple.
Five fonts have been produced for each of the script families, ranging from Regular to Heavy in weight. As weight increases along a family’s axis, the vertical strokes become thicker. However, the typeface’s horizontal strokes retain the same thickness across. So while the Regular weight of each family looks almost monolinear, the Heavy weight has very high stroke contrast.
The Regular, Medium and Semibold fonts in the Director families are recommended for use in long headlines, while Bold and Heavy are intended primarily for setting single words or pairs. At display sizes, Director’s fonts work equally well on screen or in print. Director is an excellent choice for use in advertising or for news tickers on television screens (breaking news, etc.).
Each font in the Director Devanagari family contains 776 glyphs and offers full support for all the conjuncts and ligatures required by languages written in the Devanagari script. The same is true for each Bengali font, which contain 478 glyphs. Malayalam and Tamil fonts have character sets of 400 and 269 glyphs each, respectively, and the Director Latin fonts each have 379 glyphs in their character sets.
The simplified graphic language of the Director series has precedence in many typefaces designed during the mid-20th century, including Aachen, Bank Gothic, or Eurostile. When mixing the Director variants with other typefaces, questions such as serif or sans serif are less relevant than the amount of stroke contrast present in the other font, or whether its stroke endings terminate in similar ways.
Tapas Basak and Jyotish Sonowal designed the Director Bengali family. The Director Devanagari and Latin families are from Manushi Parikh, while Nikhil Ranganathan designed Director Malayalam and Director Tamil. ITF released the Director multi-script series in February 2015.